I first experimented adding national flags to butterflies many years ago but my technique has improved a little over the years and I think these are an improvement. They all have a transparent background but to get the shadow to work effectively these animations should be applied to a light colour, or light textured background. I used a very similar technique making the National butterflies as I did with some of the other butterflies with shadows. To make them look more effective I drew a black border around the butterfly wing in my CAD program before rendering them in Artlantis, one frame at a time. Something I have not done previously.

On Pluspora, an alternative social media platform to Google+ I have found these animated butterflies to be fairly popular and it is possible to paste them directly into messages by copying the code from the linked page below and just pasting it into your message. The code has a link to the animated butterfly hosted on Giphy.

www.3dgifartist.com/pluspora/butterflies
 

Now everything has been set up the flag render can be changed, quite a laborious job as the flag proportions and placement have to be worked out accordingly. This project was not quite as easy as I first imagined it would be but that it so often the case when making gif animations but it certainly has not taken the enjoyment away that I get from making this stuff and I'm always chuffed if I see any of my work displayed on websites or blogs